YES, THE ZOO IS COMING FOR YOU

 More on zoos.  Yep.  More disgusting news on zoos.  

This entry has nothing to do, really, with the social phenomenon of "getting pegged by people who demand you stay pegged".  You know how that goes: You do a thing, and no matter who you really are, you're going to be nailed, literally crucified, by that thing you did.  You could be a saint, but that thing.  Always that thing you did.  Do you remember that thing you did?  That was uncool.  

Wait.  Maybe this blog entry has everything to do with getting pegged.  Readers will have to decide.  As if readers don't always decide.  Yes, readers always decide.  

I'm not sure when the Zooing Of America began.  What I remember wondering about when I first began to ponder this as a possibility--maybe a probability--I was living on the cusp of what is sometimes labeled "the end of the Sixties".  

That happened in the Seventies by the way.  Yes, the Sixties is the only decade in the history of Time that lasted around 14 years.  

At the end of the Sixties, or so it goes, plenty of commercial world consternation had begun to culminate in a variety of strategies to prevent something like a revolutionary counterculture from ever again emerging.  Or so it seemed to me.  In 1973 or so, disco for example began to dominate pop culture.  While this type of music, a cousin to funk, became popular because it was expressly danceable in an American Bandstand kind of way, commercial radio began replacing good old rock with this pabulum.  At first, some disco was pretty good.  Then it sank into a sort of "bargain bin counterculture".  And there in the record store bargain bins you could find all the disco you ever wanted.  

A disco album.  For thirty-nine cents.  

Looking back from this 2022 point in time, I recall there was a lot of talk in the counterculture about bringing out one's inner animal.  Much of this had to do with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Frankfurt School denizen of what has come to be called "Critical Theory".  In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse suggested that capitalism was substituting consumer culture for what he labeled authentic culture.  In art and music, for example, if the creativity was directed towards creating what the Marxists labeled "use value", or value that is labeled "beautiful" or "preferable" for what it does to human beings who respond to it, this was "authentic culture".  But if an artist or musician created solely to accomplish success in terms of "exchange value" (or $$$), it was a "false culture" that tended to become homogenized, and boring, something that created somnambulism in society.  

I'll buy that.  

The idea surrounding creating a more authentic culture was to defy the commercial laws of exchange value, and more importantly, to defy what commercialism and consumer culture do to their subjects--mainly by becoming more in touch with the authentic human hidden under all that artificiality.  

To my thinking, there seemed to be a caveat: What if this social somnambulism was advantageous to the overhyped "revolution"?  What if these "super-secret Liberal commie socialist revolutionaries" wanted a Sleeping America?  

Enter disco.  

That's when I noticed a distinct change in how FM rock radio began to manifest on the stereo systems of the poor, victimized-by-conservatism, bellybutton of the military-industrial complex known as Dallas, Texas.  

It was around 1974 or so.  On the radio, Led Zeppelin's famous song, "Stairway To Heaven", was winding up to that dramatic conclusion.  Then something horrific occurred before the word "Heaven" could sneak out of Robert Plant's mouth: 

"And she's buying...the stairway...to KZEW!"

What???

This new rock station had broken into the song to give its station identification.  Yes, home for the weekend after being away at college, I was introduced, for the first time, to The Zoo.  

The inner animal was getting shoved into a commercialized cage.

This inner animal, apparently, was itself a threat to capitalist subversion of representative government.  

Sure I was paranoid.  First disco.  And then "The Zooing Of America".  The American Dream--in a cage.  

Anyone who was actually alive, and not asleep, during that period knows that a big controversy seemed to be centered on the difference between music-as-entertainment and music-as-art.  This was definitely a Marcusian contest.  Pink Floyd, welcoming us to "the machine".  That's almost lifted from One Dimensional Man.  The split between art music and sleazy pop widened and continued to widen throughout the decade.  

Punk?  Definitely shut out of Eighties rock radio.  Instead, we got zooed.  Classic rock.  Ad Infinitum.  How many more times were we going to have to endure Styx or Billy Thorpe's "Children Of The Sun", or the strange phenomenon of heavy metal hair bands? 

Tell me: Who started the inanity of "the culture wars"?  

OK.  Forward in time, 1985, my friends and I, all of us stoned and drunk half the time, observed the onslaught of madness and stupidity here in Dallas.  Saint Ronnie Reagan was riding high like the Marlboro Man on TV.  Conservatism--or what is supposed to pass for it--was getting grabby.  Apparently, all this time, Liberals were actually "commies".  Who knew? 

Only the paranoids on the right knew it, right?  Right. 

Right on, rightists. . . 

One summer night, my friends John and Ray invited me to a house party.  Their house?  Nestled in the suburban highlands of North Dallas.  A quiet neighborhood of housewives and engineers.  Something special was going to be happening.  "We're inviting a band to play," Ray chirped.

NO!  Where? 

"It'll be OK.  They're going to set up in the living room."

Soon, when the band arrived, I couldn't help but notice the members were long-haired members of a typical Eighties heavy metal hair band.  Oh yeah.  This was gonna be good.

"Gordon, I'd like to introduce you to Allies!"

Sure enough, while Allies began to play, everyone at the party was either in the backyard or waiting to see what was certainly going to develop. 

After about a song-and-a-half, the Dallas Police arrived, cuffed Allies, and shipped them off to jail for disturbing the peace.

Peace, man. The police--arresting their allies.  Right here in ultra-conservative "Reagan Country". 

Not long after, as public countercultural consternation over the classic rock hegemony on FM radio began to peak.  I'll never forget the night a KZEW disc jockey showed up at a Butthole Surfers concert at Deep Ellum's Theater Gallery.  There he was, big man on campus, complete with a little Zoo leather jacket.  

What happened?  The crowd tossed beer at him until, drenched in lager, he abandoned the zoo.  "The Circus Animals' Desertion".  Yeats wrote that.